The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Who Is Being Delusional? - Caroline Glick

Why the Palestinians are not interested in either peace or statehood.

On Tuesday night, Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted
publicly for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime
minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.
Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of
Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea
and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the
Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea
and Samaria.
Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”
For years, the story of Abbas’s rejection of Olmert’s 2008 offer has
been underplayed. Many commentators have insisted Abbas didn’t really
reject it, but just failed to respond.
But now the truth is clear. Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.
Abbas’s many apologists in the Israeli Left insist that he didn’t
reject the plan on its merits. Rather, they argue, Abbas rejected
Olmert’s offer because, by the time Olmert made it, he was involved in
criminal investigations that forced him to resign from office eight
months later.
Hogwash, says former AP reporter Mark Lavie.
Following the interview’s broadcast, Lavie countered that if Abbas were
truly interested in establishing an independent Palestinian state, he
wouldn’t have cared about the political fortunes of the Israeli prime
minister. He would have taken the offer and run, knowing that, as Olmert
said, the likelihood that he’d get a similar offer in the next 50 years
was nonexistent.
The most notable reaction to Abbas’s admission was the reaction that
never came. The Israeli Left had no reaction to his interview.
Abbas is the hero of the Left.
He is their partner. He is their moderate. He is their man of peace.
Abbas is the Palestinian leader to whom every leftist politician worth
his snuff, from opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog to the Meretz Knesset
faction make regular pilgrimages to prove their devotion to peace.
Their man in Ramallah received the most radical offer ever to see the
light of day. And rather than accept it, he rejected it out of hand and
refused to meet with Olmert ever again, and he openly admits it.
The Left’s non-response is not surprising. Abbas’s decision to end all
speculation about whether or not he is a man of peace is merely the
latest blow reality has cast on their two-state formula.
The Left’s policy of land for peace failed more than 15 years ago when
Abbas’s boss, Yasser Arafat, preferred war to peace and initiated the
worst campaign of terrorism that Israel had ever experienced.
Yet for the last 15 years, the Israeli “peace camp” has never wavered
in its view that, despite it all, Israel must rid itself of Judea,
Samaria and Jerusalem.
Rather it members has grown angrier and angrier at their own people for
abandoning them and less and less willing to agree that there is
anything – including Israeli statehood itself – that is more important
than giving up Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria.
The Left’s reactionary position was on full display last Thursday at
the annual “peace conference” hosted by the far left Haaretz newspaper.
Last year, the conference’s audience attacked Bayit Yehudi Party leader
Naftali Bennett both verbally and physically when he presented his plan
to apply Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria. This year
it was Tourism Minister Yariv Levin’s turn to be assaulted.
Levin was subjected to constant catcalls from the audience, whose
members called him “Goebbels” for arguing that the two-state formula has
no chance of bringing peace and that the time has come to consider
other options.
But Levin’s claims were simply common sense.
This week the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion published its most
recent survey. The results were no surprise. Indeed, they were more or
less consistent with historical survey results.
According to the PCPO data, 63 percent of Palestinians oppose holding peace talks with Israel.
58 percent think Mahmoud Abbas, whose term of office ended in 2009,
should resign. A majority of Palestinians support a new assault or
“intifada” against Israel and 42 percent of Palestinians support the use
of terrorism against Israel.
Also this week, ahead of the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference on
Wednesday The Jerusalem Post published a new poll of Israeli public
opinion.
According to the data, 46 percent of Israelis support a policy of
separating from the Palestinians through the establishment of a
Palestinian state. 35 percent of Israelis support applying Israeli
sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. For Israelis under 45, the numbers are
reversed.
Today a majority of Likud Knesset members and all members of the Bayit
Yehudi’s Knesset faction oppose Palestinian statehood and support
applying Israeli law to all or parts of Judea and Samaria.
Rather than deal with the fact that neither the Palestinians nor the
Israelis support their two-state model, the Left has decided to ignore
both.
The Haaretz conference last week hosted a panel discussing whether the
two state paradigm remains viable. In his remarks, Prof. Shlomo Ben-Ami,
who served as foreign minister in 2000 during the failed Camp David
peace summit, explained that given the Israeli and Palestinian publics’
rejection of the two-state formula, (but especially the Israeli
rejection of it), the UN Security Council determine Israel’s final
borders. In other words, from Ben-Ami’s perspective, withdrawing from
Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria is more important than maintaining Israel’s
independence and governing in accordance with the will of the people.
When the panel’s moderator expressed concern that the mass expulsion of
Israelis from their communities in Judea and Samaria which the
two-state formula requires would cause a civil war within Israeli
society, Ben-Ami just shrugged his shoulders.
“I don’t delude myself. I never deluded myself that this would be a boy
scout trip,” he said. “You can’t do this through consensus….Consensus
is the great enemy of leadership.”
Ben-Ami continued, “War unites, peace divides…A leader who wants to make peace will always have a split nation behind him.”
MK Meirav Michaeli, who serves as the Zionist Union’s Knesset faction
head, said for her part that the greatest obstacle to peace is Israel.
Ever since Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Israel hasn’t had a leader
willing to do what it takes to make peace.
In Michaeli’s view, when the Left next forms a government, it will need
to adopt – as is opening position in negotiations – the position that
Israel shares responsibility for the fate of the so-called “Palestinian
refugees.”
Michaeli explained, “Israel needs to be part of a coalition that will
find a solution,” for the descendants of the Arabs that left Israel
during the 1948- 1949 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel.
Michaeli also insisted that Israel needs to stop demanding that the
Palestinians recognize the Jewish state’s right to exist. Israel should
suffice instead with a Palestinian acknowledgment that it does indeed
exist.
It goes without saying that there has never been, and there never will
be a majority of support in Israel either for Ben-Ami’s position or for
Michaeli’s position. This is the reason that they prefer to ignore the
Israeli people and wait for “the world” to save “the peace” for them.
This brings us to the 46 percent of Israelis who would like to separate from the Palestinians and let them have a state.
The only reason that a plurality of Israelis still supports a policy
that has failed continuously for the past 15 years is because the
Israeli Left has blocked all discussion of alternative policies.
Over the past 20 years, the Left has implemented three policy
initiatives: the peace process with the PLO from 1993 to 2000, the
unilateral withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 and the unilateral
withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. These policies never enjoyed the sustained
support of the majority of the public.
To the extent they ever mobilized the temporary support of bare
majorities of public, they did so only because the media campaigned
continuously on behalf of these initiatives. Not only did key all the
mass circulation newspapers and all major broadcast media outlets
support these plans, they blocked all debate about them. Opponents were
demonized as extremists.
And this brings us to the 35 percent of Israelis who support applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.
It is this virtual blackout on coverage of opposing views that makes
the results of the Post’s opinion poll remarkable. In the absence of
almost any public discussion of the possibility of applying Israeli
sovereignty over Judea and Samaria aside from the self-generated
publicity of advocates of the position, more than a third of Israelis
overall, and a plurality of young Israelis supports it.
Over the past week, Netanyahu has been asked his opinion of the
prospects for unilateral Israeli actions toward the Palestinians three
times, once in Washington and twice in Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s responses
have been enigmatic. But collectively they lend the clear impression
that the premier does not support unilateral Israeli withdrawals from
Judea and Samaria and at least in principle, does not oppose the
sovereignty model.
In his remarks at the Post’s conference Wednesday, Netanyahu said
cagily, “There are all sorts of unilateral moves in all sorts of
directions. Wait and see. And they are not necessarily in the direction
you think.”
Speaking to the Likud’s Knesset faction on Monday Netanyahu clarified
his remarks on the subject last week in Washington saying, “I didn’t say
unilateral withdrawals. I said unilateral steps. You can imagine what I
mean – states are disintegrating and we will protect our interests.”
Sitting next to Ben-Ami at the Haaretz conference was the lone
non-leftist on the panel. Halachic expert Malka Puterkovsky said that,
in her view, Israel should apply its sovereignty over all of Judea and
Samaria. Doing so, she argued, will not risk Israel’s future as a Jewish
state.
Both the audience and her fellow panelists reacted to her statements
with a the same extreme hostility with which they responded to Bennet
and Levin.
When Ben-Ami – the man who thinks it is more important for Israel to
expel some 100,000 Israelis from their homes than avert a civil war, and
prefers borders forced on Israel by the UN to Israeli democracy and
independence – was asked his opinion of Puterovsky’s position, he called
the notion of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria “delusional.”
We need to take Netanyahu’s coy responses to questions about
unilateralism as an invitation to begin a serious public discussion of
the option.
The public wants this discussion and we need this discussion.
As for how the peace camp will respond, well, there are worse things than having reactionaries call you “delusional.”Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security
Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For
more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/260865/who-being-delusional-caroline-glick Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.